Brand
Half-Built-Robots has a name, a tagline, a robot, and a handful of rules that keep them consistent. This page is the reference.
The name
The site is Half-Built-Robots, hyphenated. The name reflects the reality of my projects: started with enthusiasm, rarely finished.
The tagline
Unfinished Creations, Unbridled Innovation.
Henry
Henry is the site’s robot mascot. He is the favicon, the confused robot on the 404 page, the placeholder banner on posts without a photo, and the little face in the header that links to my portfolio.
Henry’s artwork is maintained in one place and vendored to each of my projects in a per-site colorway; he is never redrawn from scratch. Henry (the character, the name, and the artwork) is copyright Curt Henrichs LLC, all rights reserved. He is a brand mascot, not clip art, so please don’t reuse him for other projects.
The design system this site runs on is published under MIT as the @half-built packages, with every component rendered at ui.half-built-robots.com. Henry is deliberately not in it. The packages ship generic icons, and each of my sites vendors Henry separately.
Colors
The theme is monochrome with two accents, in a light and a dark mode. The light mode is ink on white. The dark mode is parchment on near-black. The accents stay the same in both.
| Swatch | Role | Hex | Used for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ink | #404040 | light mode text and rules, on white | |
| Parchment | #e8d9c3 | dark mode text and rules | |
| Dark ground | #111111 | dark mode surface | |
| Accent 1 amber | #ffaa3c | the tagline, code accents, the newsletter panel, the focus ring | |
| Accent 1 ink | #a36300 | amber as text on white, tuned to clear WCAG AA | |
| Accent 2 cyan | #3cc7dd | the success callout, the demo launcher, the containment field | |
| Warm dark | #1b140c | code block ground and newsletter ink, in both modes | |
| Outline gray | #555555 | Henry's stroke |
The tagline sits in an outlined box because amber on white does not clear the contrast bar and every darker amber that did looked flat. The box stayed in both modes. When amber has to be text on white, it is the accent 1 ink above.
Type
Roboto Mono, everywhere. Headings, body, chrome.
The rules
- The name is hyphenated. “Half Built Robots” and “HalfBuiltRobots” are wrong.
- Henry changes upstream or not at all; the site only ever re-vendors his artwork.
- The name, tagline, and Henry are not available for use in other projects without written permission (see the Terms of Use).
- Colors are not borrowed from my other projects. A new value is tuned here against this site’s accessibility checks.